“You want to be the pebble in the pond that creates the ripple for change.” - Tim Cook

My best friend and I have a new endeavor that is brought to you because of passion. Passion to do our part in leaving behind a world that will love my best friend’s children as much as they love my own.

Because, you see, despite the fact that they’re both born of half-white, half-Japanese mothers, they’re very, very different.

Sure, her children show up as boys and mine show up as girls. That’s a big difference.

But even more striking than that, is the difference in the shade of their skin.

To be fair, we are all spectrums of brown - with people who think they’re white simply having less of the brown than those who are thought of as being black in the United States.

Yet because my best friend married a black man from the south, while I married a white man from Canada, our children will have very different experiences walking through our country.

Already, her kids’ hair is touched without permission. Already, she’s talking with them about how to respond respectfully to police officers. Already, though we are both terrified about the safety of our children - as all parents are - the stats back up the fact that black children in this country are subject to more homicide - and more recently, suicide - than the rest of the population. In fact, for children ages 15-24, unintentional injury is the leading cause of death. For white children, the second leading cause is death by suicide; for black children, it’s homicide. Yes, both are horrifying. We need to talk about this stuff, because without understanding each other’s perspectives, there is no way to make meaningful, lasting change.

We decided to take the conversations we were having behind the scenes - conversations informed through law, history (her strengths), and psychology, human thriving (my strengths) - and blow them up into something that could be shared with you. Because conversations are a way to connect, to learn, to feel meaning in our lives, and conversations bring us together - so that we can understand each other and the different narratives that make up this nation.

We come to these conversations with preparation to tackle the topics that are in the news, topics that are happening in our lives, topics that intrigue us as we go. There are interviews with some incredible people too - because there are some insanely cool experts out there with experiences we can’t claim to have ourselves, and want to learn about.

Once we know better, we can do better.

We want to be the pebble.

Our belief is that we can learn, grow, and change, one conversation at a time.

"We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe, with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph." Elie Wiesel